INTERViEM!: ROBERT

ARTHUR PERRY: Why have you constantly
been drawn back tp printmaking at different
periods in your art?

ROBERT RAUSCHENBERG: I have a couple
of reasons for that. One of them is that there is
more circulation with graphics. Just physically,
they inevitably change hands more often. Plus
with graphics, there is a whole other palette of
‘equipment to excite you, to explore.

A.P.: Do you think the Gemini edition of Hoar-
frosts was nearly as successful as the singular
works?

R.R.: I got into a lot of trouble with that one. In
fact, the Hoarfrost editions that Gemini produced
had the same quality as the original unique pieces.
But then everybody who likes art knows the dif-
ference in having something that is one of twenty.
. . . [have trouble explaining this because I am on
the other side. I love that they turned out so well.
You have to fix a standard and you have to keep
it. Even if you’re working with unpredictable
materials, it has to head towards that freed image.
That’s another reason I really enjoyed working in
France when I made all the prints, and in India
where each print was handmade on the spot and
its insides were different even though the
framework within the edition was the same. In
fact, we went through culling like crazy so that
there couldn’t be any possibility of a duplicate.
What’s really nice about printmaking is working
with other people. I like that. I work with as many
distractions as I can possibly put together. If you
are working with people, even if they are just two
people, you don’t get the flat results of one on one.
Not only do you get it one to five, but you get a
constant exchange that’s absolutely limitless, like
echoes.

RAUSCHENIBERG,

A.P.: In what way did your experience of India ef-
fect the Uones and Union series?

R.R.: My trip to India had a big influence on
these works. The rags — you know they might be
silk but they are still rags — are used in India with
a mixture of mud and dirt and dry air and poverty
and disease. The whole picture is very com-
plicated. And there was the contradiction of these
very luscious fabrics also being bombarded by
these colours at the same time as the filth. The
people were so physically uncomfortable, to the
point of starving to death, and seeing these
luscious fabrics in that context relieved these
materials from being luxurious or simply
beautiful.

A.P.: But many of the works in the Bones and
Union series were somewhat precious.

R.R.: Well, they were fragile. I don’t like the
word precious.

A.P.: In 1964, you stated that you wanted to sus-
pend a brick instead of resting it on the floor, so
the brick would appear as ‘brick’ as possible. In
allowing the silks your Jammers to drape natural-
ly and by rough-molding your handmade paper
are you returning to this sensibility?

R.R.: I don’t think I ever left it. You have to
respect the integrity of the material, whatever it is,

‘or it will make you pay for it. A work is not going

to work unless you let it do exactly what it wants
to do. In some cases that’s my only job because
the situations in which those actual objects are
placed are not natural situations. A gallery is
designed to be neutral, to be able to show different
concepts. So my only job is to insist just a little
further that you are able to see exactly how things
are, rather than my forcing some kind of new
reality or asking them to give up their own integri-
ty as materials.

“8

A.P.: How do you find working with pure non-
objective materials rather than images?

R.R.: It’s much harder for me, and that’s one of
the handicaps that I allowed myself. I would hang
around all the materials, and whenever I could
lose the self-consciousness of my being there,
something started happening. I might not have
been doing anything but making mistakes and
touching things for four or five hours but then the
Jammer’s construction is so simple that ten
minutes after something worked I was through
with it and it was whipped off to a sewing
machine; it just had to be hung. My natural
nature is to touch everything. I’ve said before, my
hands are my head and my head is my stomach.
So it is only after I have touched something that

my head digests it.

A.P.: When do you find you do your best work?

R.R.: The summer’s the best season for me to
work because I don’t really mind the heat. In the
part of Texas I come from, it’s either so hot or so
humid, or both, that you are just sweating all the
time anyway. Every time we would have guests
they would say to my mother, ‘‘Dora, don’t you
have some dry sheets?’’ And you’re right there on
the beach, just running around in your
underwear, and you jump into the Gulf of Mexico
if you get too hot. In the summer on Capitva it
gets light about 5:30 in the morning, and in
daylight saving time, it doesn’t get dark until
10:30 at night. So during the course of a day you
have made four or five works, gone swimming as
many times as you want, and you ’ve caught a fish
for supper.
bie ghee